The Impact of Fundraising Management
Fundraising Management
Part 24
In our last fundraising management discussion we focused on the Internet for continuing a fundraising campaign engaging charitable foundations as a source of funding. Now we need to focus on managing disappointment.
It doesn’t matter if one is working on a capital campaign for a school, fundraising for a hospital, sending out fundraising requests for money to fund a sports team, fundraising for a church, fundraising to reduce a mortgage or fundraising to buy a building. In every fundraising campaign project there will usually be some disappointment.
Here are just a few disappointments that may occur, major donors won’t give one the money they had promised, a planned gift is contested in the courts, donors want to be removed from the mailing list, and fundraisers quit right in the middle of a fundraising campaign. Imagine for a moment that this was to happen to you…what do you do?
There are huge barriers that could possibly show up during a capital campaign or during any fundraising campaign for that matter. How one handles these problems or problems like these is really important.
Just knowing that there could be some difficulty helps one to take a problem “in stride” and not let it stop the momentum for a fundraising campaign. So what to do becomes the key focus here. Let’s examine the process for solving these issues.
First of all, identify the problem. This can be tricky but it is important to know exactly what the problem is about and how it was caused. The second thing to do is look at all the possible solutions to solving the problem regardless of how the look when they are written down.
Once the problem is identified and a number of possible solutions are offered it is time to select one. If the selected solution works fine…go with that. If the selected solution does not work then select another from the list of possible solutions and try that one. If the next solution selected solves the problem great. But, if it doesn’t work then select another solution from the list and try that one. If none of the solutions in the list work then ask others to contribute more ideas to the list.
If the new ideas added to the list don’t work it may be because there is no solution, which will work at the present time. Don’t despair just key trying and revisit the problem a few days later.
Well, that’s the way I see it!
Monty McKinnon
Master Financial Planning Services Inc.